"Some nights when I get out of bed, I cannot understand why the linoleum is like this. Every square has all these lines on it. Why? And every square is different from the others ...The lamp's looking just as strange. If you can't see the lightbulb, you can imagine that the light is emanating from its zinc stem and its satin shade. You know, the way light might radiate from a person's face--something like that."I know this happens to you sometimes too: So, for example, if there were a lightbulb burning inside my skull, somewhere deep inside, between my eyes and my mouth, how beautifully that light would ooze from my pores--you too are capable of such a thought. The light pouring especially from our cheeks and our foreheads: in the evenings, where there is a power cut.
"...But you never admit to thinking such things. Neither do I. I don't tell anyone.
"...I don't talk about these things to anyone. No one talks about such things, and so maybe I'm the only one who sees them. The attendant sense of responsibility is more than just a burden. It prompts one to ask why it is that this great secret of life is revealed only to oneself.
"Why does that ashtray tell only me of its sadness and defeat? Why am I the confessor of the door latch in its misery? Why am I the only one who thinks that by opening the refrigerator I shall come to a world exactly like the one I knew twenty years ago?
"I try to calm myself by telling myself that people cannot have so little interest in these signs.
"In a while, when I'm asleep, I too shall become part of a story."
(Orhan Pamuk, from Other Colors: Essays and a Story)
